A riparian, riverine aesthetic flows in my writing much more vitally than any Christian influence. The shining reaches are downriver, upriver, under, and spread out into the sky all at once, a definite place, and a station of awareness too. That friendship has nothing to do with organized religion. No dogma, no received beliefs there, just experience, and the way of the heart. An anonymous emailer has been asking me recently, "Are you a Muslim?
He says he doesn't have that book and comes back with the one blunt question. Organized religions have fanatical possibilities that could become dangerous to the health of the planet, not to mention the dear individuals. It is time for us to feel more comfortable in a place that is not identified with any particular religion or nation or race or cultural system , but respectful of the truth in all those masks of God, as Joe Campbell calls them. Surely after Campbell's research, we are all universalists, as the Sufis have so gently recommended for centuries.
The human soul is way more vast than any definition. I am that , a voice says, I am. Existence itself is conscious and holy.
The very IS is divine, alive, and we are swimming in it. Ibn Arabi says it this way: The Love Religion The inner space inside that we call the heart has become many different living scenes and stories. A pasture for sleek gazelles, a monastery for Christian monks, a temple with Shiva dancing, a kaaba for pilgrimage.
Love is the religion in me. Whichever way love's camel goes, that way becomes my faith, the source of beauty, and a light of sacredness over everything. But let it be said. I do love the old Appalachian shaped note hymns in the oblong Christian Harmony book. I sing them as loud and local as any Raymond Hamrick I might be standing beside.
DB: I feel that your work with Rumi has loosened the grip that some publishers and academia have had on poetry. Your translations have entered into the lives and hearts of people who don't necessarily read or write poetry.
Do you have any thoughts or intuitions on why much of contemporary poetry does not reach a wider audience? CB: I think there is a lot of wonderful work being done in contemporary poetry, but poetry has always been a marginal art here. Thus shape-note hymns, loose dogs, yellow jacket nests, the Appalachian foothills, Waffle House conversations, and even gourds become in Barks' hands much more than mere metaphorical Southern emblems:. After joining the University of Georgia in and producing three books - The Juice , New Words , and We're Laughing at the Damage - drawn from his experiences of love and parenthood, the death of his parents, and divorce, Barks took a career turn in when fellow poet Robert Bly showed him some lifeless academic translations of Rumi's poetry.
Barks won the Georgia Writers Association best poem and best poetry manuscript awards in , and over his career his own original work has been featured in numerous anthologies of Southern poetry, including Georgia Voices , a University of Georgia Press collection of Georgia's finest writers. For more than fifty years, Barks has published widely in Anglo-American poetry journals. However, after laboring to convince American publishers of Rumi's relevance to Western readers, Barks established his own publishing imprint Maypop Books to circumvent the struggle and get his translations into print.
For several years he distributed his Rumi work this way. Then, in the mids, Harper and Row took note of the growing audience for Barks' work, and arranged to publish The Essential Rumi.
Suddenly Barks' Rumi work became a national phenomenon. He would be featured in subsequent Bill Moyers specials , and in Moyers' book of interviews with American poets, Fooling with Words. In , Barks received the New York-based Temple of Understanding's Juliet Hollister Award, which is annually given to secular and religious leaders whose vision and work have supported and generated new interfaith understanding. In March , Barks was an academic envoy and speaker to Afghanistan, the first American to be sent to Afghanistan on behalf by the State Department in twenty-five years, and in May , in recognition of his translation works, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Tehran.
Over his long career he has published eleven collections of his own poetry, and twenty-two volumes of Rumi translations. Of a generation of post-WWII American poets for whom professorship was often the only way to eat and live while answering the poet's calling, Barks spent more than fifty years traveling often and widely to give readings. He has two grown sons and five grandchildren, all of whom live near him in Athens, Georgia. Barks has published eight volumes of his own poetry, including Hummingbird Sleep: Poems and Winter Sky: Poems As the foremost translator of thirteenth-century mystic poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Coleman Barks reaches a devoted, inspired, and ever-widening international audience.
His journey through life is deeply embedded in his work. The poems spring directly from experience and engage with subjects such as the elation and struggle of having and raising children, grief over the deaths of loved ones, the transition from parent to grandparent, or the changing nature and intensity of desire.
Whether it is the childhood excitement of being named best athlete at summer camp or the early signs of dementia at the age of seventy, Barks uses the personal to convey the universal. Without question, we can credit Coleman Barks with making Rumi accessible to American readers through his modernized renditions of the best-known poems of the great Islamic mystic.
Rumi and Shams inspired each other for several years, until Shams mysteriously disappeared. He is free. It is so easy to say I want a new life in the form of some new shoes a new darkblue turtleneck and a big scruffy poncho for poetry reading a whole new set of people a new wife new town new children.
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